Chau Chau Kang Nilda. Even for a bhoti speaking land, the name sounds exotic. Off course it has a meaning, much like everything else in Spiti. But then in a valley where you have a few thousand people in all, everything acquires a meaning. Anyhow, they tell me it means 'the blue moon in the sky'. And so I quietly take everything back. No one could have named it better.
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| Chau Chau Kang Nilda rising behind the village of Langza |
With the small village of Langza in its lap, Chau Chau is one for paradoxes; A giant among hillocks. An approachable massif in a forbidden land. A riot of colours in a barren country. A cute ascent (by mountaineering standards) and yet hardly summited.
Off course a beastly beauty like this doesn't go without a legend. Chau Chau has its share of a mountain fairy and a lazy village man, ubiquitous crew members of Spitian folklore. The lazy man and the mountain fairy are somehow madly in love and play in the mountain's lap often. The lazy man can't speak about the lady to anyone. But laziness brings ridicule brings frustration, and the secret is out. Fairy is hurt but duty-bound. The Lazy man can't have her back again. The moment he approaches the mountain, the weather goes awry and all he can do is retreat.
Well if the lazy man was alive, he could have taken solace in the fact that the fairy admits no one. No party ever has had a clear weather while climbing. A sudden blizzard, an unexplained hailstorm, an uninvited off-balancing gale; the fairy repels everyone. After all the blue moon is to be seen, not touched.
We don't go near. Not that we could have. But more importantly we mistake Chau Chau for peak Shilla*, the much more popular cousin further up north. The fairy probably loves the mis-identification. For once there are people who don't want to conquer her, don't even know about her. She blesses us with a sighting of 20-odd strong herd of Blue-sheep on the opposite side. And by the time we click a thousand photographs of newborn lambs, she changes into robes of gold. Sunkissed by the star going behind the Pin-Parbati mountains, she stands there aware of her beauty and yet generous enough to display it. We savour a few photographs before she's shy and pulls curtains.
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| Blue Sheep lambs- Learning the Buddhist ways of a 'balanced' life |
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| The dusky Chau Chau Kang Nilda |
Weeks later, that aura still brightens up my dimly lit Study. It was a dream we saw that day, with eyes wide open. And to that we shall be grateful, to the blue moon, and back.
*Shilla - a legendary peak of the past. Its height, wrongly attributed at 7300m in 1860, made it to be the highest peak summited in the world for about 47 years. Presently the height has been scaled down to a conservative 6132m; the legend however still persists largely in public memory and not infrequently in state GK books.
References
1. Spiti- Where the two worlds meet. The Himalayan Journal Vol. 40, 1984.
2. Spiti- Adventures in Trans-Himalaya, Harish Kapadia, Indus Publishing Company, 2009.
3. Exploring Kinnaur and Spiti in Trans-Himalaya. Deepak Sanana, Dhanu Swadi. Indus Publishing Company, 1998.
Wonderful
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